Pillow Talk
by MaggieMay19
Summary: I never thought I would write a Jisbon one-shot. Jane and Lisbon have 'the sexual history conversation'. Fluff-free zone. Jane's history starts very young, which you might consider makes this 'M' territory (theme not language). Set after 'Blue Bird' as so many other fics have been. Jisbon is way outside my comfort zone, apologies if it affected my prose.


Teresa Lisbon lay with her head on Patrick Jane's chest listening to his heartbeat. She liked to do this with her lovers, even the one night stands, hearing his breathing and heart rate return to their normal resting rhythm afterwards feeling to her as intimate as the act itself. Her mind drifted to her other lovers, not so many really. Greg the only serious one, a handful of what turned out to be, in the end, short-term boyfriends. Maybe a few more one nighters. She smiled at the memory of Walter Mashburn, her only memorable one night stand, a man she had found herself attracted to in spite of herself, a man she hadn't thought about for five years. All of them, every one, had just been utterly outclassed by Jane. She wondered…

"How many lovers have you had?" As soon as she said it out loud she regretted it. It wasn't an uncommon conversation to have with a new partner but now really wasn't the time… She couldn't take it back, though. He hadn't tensed, his heart rate and breathing were as steady as ever. Her Catholic upbringing had made these conversations more difficult than they had to be over the years but he seemed totally comfortable with it.

"Can't remember." He said it sleepily, dismissively, not opening his eyes. What the hell? Jane can't remember something? She recoiled from him as if she'd been scalded. He could have said 'a hundred' and she wouldn't have minded – much – but how could he lie to her like that, automatically, casually?

Patrick had been basking in the afterglow, revelling in the feeling of her snuggled up against him with her head on his chest. He felt her question was perfectly appropriate at this new turn in their long relationship, of course she'd be curious, so he'd answered completely honestly. His eyes were open now, he'd rolled onto his side and was looking at her with concern. For years she'd shown so much trust in him. She'd gotten off the plane, hadn't she? Now she thought he was lying? He had to trust she wouldn't regret her recent decision so soon afterwards.

"No, Lisbon, wait, don't be like that. I didn't mean… Look, all adolescent boys go through a 'notches on bedposts' phase, of course I remember them all but I deliberately stopped counting at two. It just seemed… unchivalrous."

Unchivalrous. In spite of herself she felt her lips twitch upwards at such an absurd choice of words. She had started this after all, however accidentally, and apparently he wasn't actually lying to her. 'Remember them all' – that was an ominous phrase, surely only a few steps behind 'scale of one to ten.' Or one to a hundred, maybe. Her heart sank a little.

He was holding his arms out to her. "Come on, there's something on your mind. What do you want to know? I wouldn't lie to you, Lisbon. Not now." She moved back towards him, let him wrap his arms around her, listening to his heartbeat again but making sure he couldn't see her face. This was going to make her blush, she was sure of it. What did she want to know?

"I'm sorry, now isn't the time…"

He nuzzled her ear, whispered, "Stop stalling, Lisbon."

"How many were serious?"

"Two. Angela and you. How about you?"

Whoa, she hadn't expected that! She should have though, she'd started this conversation, he had every right to ask her as many questions as she asked him. Why the hell couldn't she keep her mouth shut?

"Um, two as well, I guess. Greg and you." She felt him nod slightly, as if she was confirming something he already knew.

"Dammit Jane, can't you ever stop doing that?"

"Sorry. Don't you think it gives us an added level of intimacy?" He certainly felt it did. She'd appreciated his prescience a short while ago.

"Reading my mind? No, it's too one-sided."

"I'm not…" he started but then trailed off, gesturing vaguely with his hand. He continued, more tenderly, "I am sorry. No I can't switch it off, but you ask away, it won't be one-sided when you know everything about me."

"Everything?"

"I don't want to keep secrets from you, Lisbon. Just tell me what you want to know." He settled back on the pillows, she resumed her place on his chest and he stroked her hair. She didn't usually like people fiddling with her hair but she was loving this.

Where to start? "Uh… STDs?" She cringed inwardly. Why did she start there? Because that's where you do start this kind of conversation. Patrick still seemed as relaxed as ever. He was affectionately thinking, 'Of course Lisbon would start there. She's a cop to her very bones.' He needed to gauge the level of detail, though. Now wasn't the time to get too descriptive.

"Once. Christine from Peoria. Long time ago. You?" She was a bit shocked to hear him name the girl rather than the infection. He probably did remember every one, she thought glumly. One hundred women to be compared to, never mind the perfect first wife…

Stalling again, she asked, "Don't you know?" He nearly smiled at this. He'd judged the level of detail about right, maybe she didn't want to hear names though.

"There's always going to be things you have to tell me, Lisbon. I'd guess none, you're careful and were never promiscuous, but things can happen even in the most well-ordered lives. I haven't secretly read your medical records, if that's what you want to know." She swallowed. If she didn't want him pulling that mentalist crap on her she needed to stop stalling with questions like that.

"No, never. You, uh, had unprotected sex?"

"Not as a rule, no. This was back in the 'Eighties, there was a fresh AIDS story in the news every week. Condoms were the must-have accessory." The 'Eighties! Dear God! She'd still been playing with dolls back then. He was only a few years older than her…

"How old were you, you know, your first time."

September tenth, nineteen eighty-eight. Six days before my fourteenth birthday."

"_Thirteen!_ Jeez Jane, that's very young." OK maybe by then she wasn't playing with dolls, but still… Creepy that he could name the date. Or maybe not, this was Jane after all. Did she want to know the details? Would she want to kiss and tell about Greg? No! Dammit, he wasn't asking anything, he thinks he already knows enough not to have to ask.

Young? He thought about that for a moment. Helena was the name of his first, a Townie girl, all bright green hair, black eye liner and piercings. They met in her house at her seventeenth birthday party, he'd quietly crashed it because his dad wanted a hot-read on her hippie mother. She'd found him in her parents' bedroom but he'd talked his way out of trouble and into her room instead. He was a good-looking boy and taller than her, she'd assumed he was older than he was because of how he talked and the way he introduced her to her dad's finest bottle of Scotch. It had been hidden away for the duration of the party but not sufficiently hidden from someone like Patrick Jane. He'd let her kiss him first, started making out (something he was already good at), she had expected for things to go further so he'd obliged. Not a big deal, apart from her being his first. It could have happened half a dozen times before then if circumstances had been different. His first taste of Macallan whisky that evening too, a brand he still liked. He'd even managed to get a good hot read, what he learned about the Mom that night had left her bank balance lighter by nearly a thousand bucks in total by the time the Show left town the following Monday. Busy times.

"I guess. It didn't seem so young at the time. You have to remember, Lisbon, I'd been living in a very adult world for over two years by then." His heartbeat told her he was calm as ever. She was blushing just thinking about her own first time, with Greg. Poor Jane, 'living in a very adult world.' She just bet he had. Her own, very different, shift into a more adult world would happen in 'eighty-nine. She tried to lighten the mood.

"So… Did you have a girl in every town? Like a sailor has a girl in every port?"

"Pretty much. For a while, at least. Sometimes two. One time I had four but we were in Spartanburg for three weeks that year, they were celebrating some kind of bicentenary I think. I never cheated on any of them, you know, it just… never lasted long." Usually leaving town had seen to that, or he'd been able to engineer her wanting or having to dump him. He was good at making parents approve or disapprove of him, whichever he needed. He hadn't been so good at gauging the amount of disapproval, at least at first. He'd been beaten up by more dads and big brothers than he cared to remember. It hadn't stopped him from feeling superior to them all.

"Just until the Carnival moved on?" Dammit, why can't she stop her mouth running away like that? It sounded much more calculated than she had meant it to. But so did he, he'd given a more serious – and colder – reply to her question than she'd expected.

"Yes, or like I said sometimes not even that long. I'm not proud of it, Lisbon, not now anyway. I remember being pretty smug at the time."

"Wasn't it lonely?" She thought about her own feelings after her occasional brief encounters.

"Um, teenage boys don't think like that. Notches on bedposts, remember? At the time it felt… Magnificent." Well of course it had. He'd been the boy who could get any girl he chose. She couldn't see his face but it sounded like he was grinning when he said that last word. What the hell?

"You said you deliberately chose not to do that. Notches on bedposts, I mean." No he hadn't counted them. He'd been much worse. He'd treated girls like any other thing he was learning to do well. They had been catalogued. He'd clinically noted what they'd been doing together, how she responded, tentatively matched what she liked and disliked with her personality traits, compared her to other girls with the same traits, varied whatever they were doing or introduced something he thought she might like to see if her responses were unique or general to that kind of personality… In the early days he'd asked them what they liked but later he hadn't needed to, much. A rating system of one to ten would have been more human.

"Oh Lisbon, you're sweet. I love that you always think the best of me." He leaned over, gave her a very gentle kiss on her ear, then went back to stroking his fingers through her hair. Where had that come from, she thought? She had wanted to gain some understanding of her new man, but this was more baffling than ever. "I didn't count them and I made sure all my girlfriends were older than me. Like I said, I'm not proud of myself." His heartbeat continued steady, calm. It was almost infuriating.

"Older? None of my High School friends ever went out with younger boys! You wouldn't be seen dead with someone younger."

"Because…?"

"Well, they were younger," she said weakly. It would have been embarrassing for any of her circle but especially for her. A quirk of birth dates meant that Stan, though nearly twenty-one months younger, was only one year behind her at school. "Kids, you know?" The recollection that Jane hadn't gone to High School struck her with renewed force. "In senior year one of my friends dated a sophomore from college for a while." She smiled at how scandalous that had seemed, back then.

Patrick nodded. "High School reinforces that kind of thinking, with its well-defined year groups, and you didn't want to go out with people who knew your brother. Plus boys generally mature later than girls emotionally speaking, so they're happy to date mature younger girls while girls don't want to be seen dating immature younger boys. It wasn't a problem at college, was it? As a Sophomore you went out with a Freshman for a while and no-one batted an eyelid."

"_Jane!"_

"Okay, then, how about when Rigsby dated Jackie Shaper? My point is that difference in age matters more the younger you are. On my twelfth birthday I still looked like I should be in Elementary School, I was small and skinny for my age, but that year I started a big growth spurt. By the time I was fourteen I was as tall as my dad, my voice had broken and I looked much older than I was. I was always a stranger in town so girls couldn't tell if I was younger than them."

"But why date older girls?"

Now his heart rate went up a little. Did he really want to go there? Patrick was silent for a moment, then said quietly, "For the challenge."

"The challenge?" His heart rate was quickly back to its resting rhythm.

"Look, kids date to learn about relationships, right? They experiment, don't they? Find out about the opposite sex. Or the same sex, or whatever. That's what adolescence is all about, isn't it? I wasn't any different. Well, not very different, anyway. All adolescent boys go through a phase of notches on bedposts." Lisbon turned to look at him. He'd confessed to an STD, to teenage promiscuity on an apparently breathtaking scale, but this is what bothered him? Dating older girls?

"Why were you different Jane?" He gently moved her off him, snuggled down until he was looking directly at her. To her distress she saw him look at her warily. "Hey, it's OK, you don't have to tell me."

"No, you asked, I said no secrets. OK. By the time I was fourteen I was pretty good at… what I do now." He paused, but she was still none the wiser. "Can you even imagine a teenager with my kinds of skills?" He shook his head. "I mean, not as good as I am now, but… I got better. The way I improved was to… Practice." If he'd said 'slaughter puppies' he couldn't have sounded more ominous.

"Okay… Practice is how everyone improves at what they do, Jane." He looked at her as though carrying on was the last thing he wanted to do.

"Oh Lisbon." There was a long pause as he looked in her eyes. She was suddenly reminded of the time, years ago, when he'd confessed to her about his breakdown. "What do I do? What am I?"

"I… I don't understand, Jane –"

"I'm a predator. I go after bad guys with you and the FBI now but people have always been my prey. Back when I was fourteen I don't think I was any more self-centered than other boys, but I was much better at pursuing girls. Well, not just girls, by then I was a con man as well of course but… You can't practice kissing without having someone to kiss. You can't practice seduction without having someone to seduce." He could see her playing out that train of thought to its logical conclusion in her head. "You think I'm a good guy but back then I wasn't playing a clarinet. I was playing people. Girls weren't notches on bedposts, they were practice."

He could see Lisbon was shocked. He hadn't wanted to disillusion her but even more he wanted to be truthful with her.

"Jesus, Jane, that's cold." Yes, to put it mildly. He'd used much more choice words in the privacy of his own head over the years. Her expression was, for once, unreadable. Her past was tough and it made her wary but it taught her compassion for those around her. His had been brutal and it taught him only cold brutality towards marks he'd rarely thought of as real people for much of his life. His time in the warm Venezuelan sunshine meditating on his life with Lisbon and the others at the CBI had thawed much of the ice in his soul but it was still there. Would she be able to accept the real him, not the illusory man she imagined she loved all this time? He hoped she would understand the coldness in him didn't extend to her, not any more. She tentatively put her hand on his chest.

"Yes." No excuses, no self-justification, no weaseling out of it. It wasn't all of who he was now though it had been a big part of him back then, before he'd achieved his revenge.

"It still bothers you. When you said older girls were simply a challenge it bothered you."

Her words made him love her so much at that moment. She always, always tried to think the best of him. He hoped she always would. He stroked a lock of hair from her face. "A little. I've been me a long time."

"As a teenager you avoided younger girls because you thought they would be too impressionable, you didn't want to hurt them."

"I still caused a lot of pain." Now she was smiling at him.

"You think you're a heartless con-man but your heart gives you away." For you, Lisbon, always.

Shaking his head in wonder he leaned in and kissed her.

Author's Note: Apologies to all Southern Carolinians: I know Spartanburg was founded in 1787, not after 1788 as implied in this fic. I like the idea you might have included a big long Carnival in your bicentenary celebrations, whichever year it was. So much more fun than commissioning a statue or plaque.


End file.
